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Muppetry in Motion ( but thank god for the dog )
It all started Friday when a mate called me and asked if I wanted to help hime get some veni as his freezer was a wee bit low in the meat dept. Had a contact how had rung him to say there were 3 deer coming out evry night on the edge of his property and did he want one/all them for the freezer.
We lft Nelson and 0300 and just before we got the spot concerned we did a little bit of planning.
Plan was to quietly walk up and hit the lights and pop a couple of the deer which should be standing there …………………..
I had my little 6.5TCU with a Maxtoch 2x mounted on the side. Mate had a Poo for free.
Exited the car and quietly sneaked up. Ready lights on, (about now Mr Murphy and the Muppet show appeared). Deer had not read the script and were about 20m from us instead of the 90m they normally would have been (according to the farmer)
Mate had view blocked by bush which was unseen in the darkness, while he moved I was trying to get a bead on one of the beasties the wind changed from in the face to up the arse.
I looked thru scope to see 2 reticules as the brightness was way too high on the illumination. I'm pretty sure "Buck Fever" poped in for a visit about this time
Deer bolted and then stopped at about 30 yards, I chose what I thought was the right set of cross hairs, and let fly and thought I heard a hit, mate was cursing something about about "fucken bushes" and the deer bolted at the shot.
Let the dog loose and she search around a little bit didn’t show much interest. We had a good search for ½ an hour by torch and found nothing. No blood, hair or anything else to indicate a hit.
We gave it away and decided to have a look elsewhere and return in daylight for a better look.
Couple hour’s later we were back and started searching. Finally found few drops of blood about 50 yards inside the bush edge and started following a very sparse blood trail. Dog at this stage seemed a little confused as to what we wanted her to do but she got plenty of practice and by the end of the performance I think she was actually getting the hang of it.
After following said trail of blood for nearly 3 hours we finally caught up to the deer. Well it winded us and took off again thru the bush, it was still pretty mobile. I let the dog go after it and she returned 5 minutes later and we were off again.
Eventually we found got back on its trail, found some more blood and with help of the dog found it and dispatched it .
For the record the first shot had trashed its back leg so we were chasing a 3 legged deer
Gps track shows we covered 2.9km from where we found the first blood to where we caught up with it finally. And there was a lot of uphill and down dale
There were times when I had a bad feeling it was not going to end well but persistence paid off in the end. I am thankful we caught up with it as I can only imagine the horrible death it would have had otherwise.
Wounding an animal and having it escape is the one thing I dread
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